I've played almost 200 hours over the last 4 months, I've installed it in early June 2020 so it was already mature by then, and rid of all its infancy bugs (which, I heard, were plenty).
I had prepared a few screenshots to illustrate the review, but unfortunately I'm limited to 6 of them...
Story
The story unfolds with the main quest, and the lore & settings are not forced upon the player, there's not a lot of reading to be done at the beginning to understand the world. Bits are given through conversations, and the important words are emphasized, which allows the player to hover the mouse or click on them for more details, for example on deities, characters, families, and so on. That's an elegant way to present the information, and the classical encyclopedia complements this information, together with the basics of the game mechanics.
Most of the dialogs are spoken, which quite good voice acting. There are several companions, who have their own history and sometimes agenda, and the player selects up to 5 of them on each sortie (when going out of a village, city or town). They have their own character, orientation and class, and sometimes they interact with one another, for the better or the worst.
The player has access to a journal with a summary of each quest, the subgoals and what is expected next. It does not keep an exhaustive track of all the dialogs, and does not babysit the player too much by giving spoilers away, but just keeps the necessary information so that the player can remember all the quests, which may be useful when coming back to the game after leaving it for a while.
The journal entries don't reveal too much, but keeps the progression under control
In the quest stories and in general, the dialogs are always immersive and keeping to the Pathfinder universe, and characters are faithful to their class and orientation. There is humour, but it well balanced and not overdone, you'll find it more frequent than in Neverwinter Nights, but nothing like the sometimes grotesque comedy in Divinity: Original Sin series.
Game mechanics
It is based on the 1st edition of the Pathfinder ruleset, which is similar to the D&D ruleset, but may look a little more complex. The Core Rulebook specifies the rules more closely, or less loosely, than D&D. Each character is defined by his/her class (or classes), skills and feats.
This game is very clear and transparent to the player on all the mechanical parts: all stats are detailed by hovering the mouse on them, for instance the dependencies or such skill, or which elements contribute to such ability score modifier. The combat events are also available in a separate window, and each decision or event can be detailed as well, which helps the player understand how it works, and improve over time.
The game started with RTwP combat mode, and recently added turn-based mode. The latter is nicely implemented, though not entirely stable yet, sometimes the turn would remain stuck, especially when there are many characters involved (typing Ctrl-F11, then closing the bug window seems to unlock the situation when this happens).
Combat and details on a particular event
The world is composed of areas, like villages, cities, towns, dungeons, …, connected with routes, which must be discovered. Walking from one area to another one takes time, and enemies or other surprises sometimes happen on the way, for example forcing a fight, or giving an opportunity such as meeting a special merchant. It is possible to rest en-route or in areas, but in dungeons the party must have rations. The resting must be managed, by selecting who's hunting, cooking, guarding the camp, and so on, which adds a little bit to the game.
Each area must be loaded from disk. I've seen people complaining about that, personally I find it quick enough not to worry about it.
On top of the main campaign, the player must manage the territory (the barony), which is yet another layer in the game. As for the quests and the resting, this is a team effort, and the main character is helped with advisors, which are either companions or other important characters also playing in the campaign. Their proficiency and inclinations to manage such or such part of the barony is linked to their core abilities, which take a specific meaning in that part of the game (as they do while resting).
So there are 3 different meanings for the core abilities, which is a bit disorienting at first, but offers a sort of 3-dimensional reference.
As part of the territory management, the player must face events and projects, and put advisors on these tasks to solve problems or improve the barony. He must also build owned villages, towns and cities, but this is only visible on a map, and building a new tavern, for example, will not reflect when the party enters the area in "quest mode". This is probably out of the scope of this game, but it would have been a great achievement to see the result of a flourishing barony outside of management maps. Instead, this seems like an artificial addition to influence the stats somewhat, but without much consequence.
I'm usually not a big fan of meta-management of that sort, but in this case it is relatively well integrated, and interesting. This brings something else for the player to do, without distracting from what is happening in the story.
The game can be saved anytime except during combat. There are auto-saves, quick saves, and custom saves, with no limit.
Items
Items are stored in a shared inventory, where they can be placed and reordered manually. The load is shared between the party members, and items can be accessed by any member anytime, even if they are far apart. In villages (cities, towns) where the party is dissolved, items can still be accessed by the player's character, and they can be equipped to any of the companion. This item management makes life easier and while this is less realistic, the same outcome could be reached anyway with enough planning, so why not?
Inventory and comparison with equipped weapon
The merchants, however, are all behaving the same. They don't all sell the same goods, but they buy anything, at the same price, and seem to have endless pockets to pay. Furthermore, they are available 24/7. This was probably designed that way by lack of time, and is perhaps a bit too simplistic.
There is no crafting.
Presentation
Graphics, sounds and music are on par with modern CRPGs. Overall, the game gives a feeling of a well-polished and consistent interface.
The graphics in "quest mode" are 3D isometric, with (somewhat limited) zoom. It is not possible to rotate the camera, though one interesting mod (Bag of Tricks) unlocks the camera rotation and extends the zoom limits. Special effects are convincing, without cluttering the screen.
Using the keyboard and the mouse is easy and smooth, the controls are solid. The default keyboard is set for QWERTY keyboards, but it is possible to customize it according to personal preferences and layout. It is also possible to use an X-Box controller since the game was ported to console, though I haven't tested it… in my opinion, and also from the feedback I read, the game style isn't really compatible with playing casually on a couch with a gamepad, so this was perhaps a strange move from Owlcat Games.
The music and ambiant sounds are well made, if a bit repetitive. Unfortunately, a special care seems to have been taken to dogs barking, in all areas and circumstances, which quickly becomes very irritating, and the only way to get rid of that is to hack the sound libraries. Fortunately, while the ambient sounds tend to repeat themselves randomly, there are no looped dialogs like in Divinity: Original Sin series, so the player doesn't have to endure continuously repeated sentences while staying in a place for a while.
The performances were quite good on my old PC (i7-4770K at 3.5 GHz, nVidia GTX 980 Ti, game installed on SSD).
Conclusion
This is only a personal opinion, of course. I find this game very well balanced and polished, pleasant and fun to play, and I love how the mechanics are implemented and transparent to the player.
It is also a bit more demanding than the average CRPG: the ruleset is less frequent in that style of game than D&D, a bit more complex - at least in its description since it covers the rules more in depth than D&D, which leaves out a part of the decisions to the DM. It also lets the player search and think by himself a little more than other games, there won't be a big pointer on the next NPC to talk to, nor a big cross on the map where the big treasure is hidden. That extra difficulty may repel a more casual category of players… while it may appeal more to the hard-core ones.
The storytelling is not heavy, it is integral to the quest, and the dialogs are usually a few paragraphs long, not a few pages long. They give the player sufficient depth while not breaking the momentum, they are not expanding every bit of lore but yet they give the option to read more about specific terms if the player wishes to.
I recommend it without any hesitation to any player who's not afraid to put 200+ hours in a CRPG, especially if they enjoy a sound ruleset implementation. I would also advise to install the Bag of Tricks and the SkipIntro mods (I believe the latter is now covered by an option of the former) for the camera control and to make the loading title faster.
The game is available on GOG, and Steam.